Contractor weathers time pressure

Every contractor races the clock on construction deadlines. Lorentz Bruun Co. is also racing the weather on Mount Hood.

The Portland-based contractor has three shifts of workers remodeling the Collins Lake Resort site seven days a week. The busiest shift has about 400 people.

The work involves replacing failing roofs on the 24-building complex, so Lorentz Bruun needs to get the exterior work finished before the weather turns.

“It’s difficult mostly because it’s a compressed schedule, a tight lot, and we don’t really know when the end date is,” said Eric Saunders, project manager for Lorentz Bruun. “Because who knows when it’s going to snow. We have to be done as fast as possible.”

The project would strain a contractor even in perfect weather. That’s why other contractors proposed taking two, three, or even four construction seasons to finish the job.

But Lorentz Bruun officials promised they’d get the job done in one season. They approached the project like a military mobilization, with a battalion-sized workforce and as much equipment as could fit on the small site, near Government Camp.

“We have three or four superintendents and two project managers and four project engineers,” said Mark Bruun, executive vice president for Lorentz Bruun. “There’s basically a mini office up here.

Beating the snow requires more than sheer muscle and machinery. It also takes innovative engineering.

Rather than tear off the roofs of all the buildings, Lorentz Bruun, working with TM Rippey Consulting Engineers and RDH Group, designed a roof-truss system that could be installed alongside existing trusses.

That keeps the ceilings of the 151 units intact, said Dave Young, building science specialist and principal with RDH Group. “The other alternative would have been to strip the roof and put new trusses down,” he said.

“You would have had to take out all the insulation and sprinkler heads, all the drywall, and the whole roof would be exposed,” Young said. “This way, all you had to do is take the plywood sheeting off, drop the trusses down, fasten them to the existing trusses and new beams and put new sheeting over the top.”

If that’s easy for a building science specialist to say, it’s much harder for a builder to do. Only creative planning and scheduling can move the project toward that goal, Saunders said.

Instead of looking at Collins Lake as one huge project, Lorentz Bruun officials broke it into six discrete zones. “Each zone is treated as its own individual job,” Saunders said. “Broken into six, it doesn’t seem like such a daunting task.”

The job office has a “war board”: a wall-size magnetic map of the project that keeps all the tasks organized. Officials use an assembly-line approach to make sure workers and the equipment are in place precisely when they’re needed.

“There are 144 framers working seven days a week,” Mark Bruun said. “And chasing the framers are the roofers.”

The assembly-line approach lets each set of workers focus on one main task, Saunders said. Roofers don’t break their flow to seal up their work, because other workers take care of it.

“All one crew does is button up things for water protection,” Saunders said. “That way, the day crew can just worry about production.”

Brett Fischer owns a condo at Collins Lake and is also general manager of the company that manages the resort, Mt. Hood Management. Condo owners weren’t pleased when they learned they would have to clear out of their units last May. But the leaky condos served as a reminder that something needed to be done.

“When people were first told they were going to have to be out of there this summer, there were a couple weeks of ‘wow,’ with the financial aspects and renting the units,” Fischer said. “But after people went to the meetings at the Lorentz Bruun office, they understood what was going on, and that they were going to have a better product.”

Fischer said he feels the same anxiety as Lorentz Bruun officials over getting the project done. “I think it’s going to come down to the next couple weeks, until the weather starts to turn,” he said. “At this point, all we can do is cross our fingers.”

Monica Cory of Portland owns a Collins Lake condo that she and her family use mostly on weekends. Her 12-year-old son, James, is a ski racer and spends 12-hour days on the mountain.

The family plans on skiing this November, Cory said, and is counting on Lorentz Bruun to finish the resort in time. “They stepped up and made that commitment,” she said. “Now the ball’s in their court.”